MARC LEPINE: CRIMINAL OR FOLK HERO?
Most folk heroes started out as criminals, so they say. In 1989, it was clear to most people what Marc Lepine was: a criminal and a mass murderer. Twenty years later, it has changed: it is far from clear now. The simple fact that his name has not been forgotten and that his visibility, dare we say popularity, has increased, says a lot not only about the man but about the general public and its perceptions.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

NEW IDEAS, NEW INTERPRETATION

Marc Lepine's father was an Algerian immigrant, a Muslim wife-beater who taught his boy how to hate women. Now that's the new post 9/11 explanation: an attack of a Muslim militant on Western women.

Another one: beyond the massacre itself, Lepine's story is interesting because it has been used by special interest groups to achieve their own ends: the anti-gun lobby and the women's rights advocates.

The massacre profoundly shocked Quebecers and all Canadians. The Quebec government and the Montreal city government declared three days of mourning. When Lépine's motive became clear, the event served as a massive spur for the Canadian feminist movement and for action against violence against women. December 6 is now observed as a memorial day, especially in Montreal; in 1991 Parliament officially designated December 6 as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. A white ribbon is used as a symbol of December 6 memorials. In Ottawa a memorial to victims of violence against women was erected as a reaction.

But this Half-mast mentality was profoundly disliked by war veterans, who were now asking: Does the 'Montreal massacre' means more to Canadians than the sacrifice of two world wars? Heritage Canada ordered all Canadian flags lowered to half-mast on December 6 for several years in a row, at every government building, military base and naval vessel. Ships stationed in the Arabian Sea as part of the country's contribution to the U.S. war on terrorism lowered their flags too. The policy outraged war veterans.

Mandatory gun registration came about as a result of Lepine's massacre. The massacre was a major spur for the Canadian gun control movement, which finally resulted in the passage of stricter gun control legislation in 1995.

These events occured at the right time to further the feminist agenda. Coincidental or not one clearly sees that THERE ARE AGENDAS and that events WILL BE USED TO FURTHER THEM.

What extremists like Micheline Carrier and the feminist Sisyphe group have to say about it

They postulate that a sympathy towards Marc Lepine has always existed in Canada. This sympathy they talk about was certainly not there in 1989 in male and masculist milieux, but thanks to their various excesses in a relentless twenty years hate campaign against men and everything masculine, they have succeeded in incurring the wrath of even the most moderate men. Now most Canadians cannot stand radical feminists anymore. They are merely tolerated in some media, and what they secretly feared most all this time has almost come to pass: many begin to feel sympathy now towards Marc Lepine. Some see in him a victim, others a friendly monster which reveals to us some ugly truths about our values and our society.

Micheline Carrier even admits in Opinions on 06/12/2002 that Canadian and Quebec media would have long made a hero of Marc Lépine if he would not have committed suicide. We could read in opinion in the daily Newspapers, hear him on the radio and watch him on TV calomniate prominent feminists. So, clearly the guy had charisma. But Lépine is not the only one who had identified feminists as his enemies. Some Quebec ministers have since proclaimed that feminists and their values could be sometimes viewed as obstacles to men's rights. Feminism has led women to reduce the rights of men in family matters, health and the education system. Pierrette Bouchard even wrote that «as mothers, women are suffocating, asphyxiating their spouse and their children; as single-mothers, their disciplin and leadership in non-existent; as teachers, they dictate their values to the school and the schoolboard and repress the free expression of boys; as feminists, they are castrating. As for the women's movement, it has unduly helped girls benefit from a preference treatment.»

The Montreal Massacre is much more than violence against womenSue McPherson on December 1, 2005 wrote that Canadians should re-examine that terrible day and rethink the killer, the victims and the lives of others involved. The Montreal Massacre was an appalling tragedy which has now taken its place in Canadian history, remembered mainly as an ultimate example of male violence against women, but the reasons behind this atrocious event have never been adequately explored. Lépine saw himself as a political activist, but unable to resolve his own personal dilemma or what he saw as political wrongs in society. Instead of accepting his fate or leaving quietly, he chose to use a violent means of making a political statement by killing feminists before ending his own life.

Responses to his actions for the most part focused on apparent weaknesses in his personality and academic worth, together with the abuse he endured in childhood, to back up the idea that Marc Lépine was less than a human being. Against this image of monstrosity, the memory of the 14 women killed represented innocence, and the feminist claim that these women were killed simply because they were women had suddenly a ring of validity.

Most of the writing on the Montreal Massacre has been done from the perspective of the obvious victims - the women who were killed. But the reasons why Marc Lepine did what he did have never been permitted to come to light, or were quickly dismissed. As time goes by, it becomes clear that no one has seriously tried to understand the effect feminism was having on Canadian society at the time? As a man, Marc Lepine discovered abruptly that the place that had traditionally been men's - in male-dominated fields at the university and in careers in this world - was suddenly being shared with women, no longer being men's alone. For this to happen, some men had to lose and accept it. But Lepine, age 25, refused to. Without support from his parents, not being even middle class, and not holding the same values as other guys his age, Marc Lepine was at a disadvantage when it came to being accepted at the engineering school.

Extremist Micheline Carrier again

... remembers that a few month earlier another young man, Jean-Guy Tremblay, had shocked Quebec's public opinion in challenging the right of his ex-wife to perform an abortion without his consent. The Supreme Court of Canada had to rule during the summer holidays. What a shame. Imagine, he dared dispute her right as a woman to terminate her pregnancy. Unthinkable. But this was only the prelude to something else, then a few months later the unmasked avenger would strike; behold: the Predator Terminator Lepine.

Seriously fucked up Mélissa Blais

In Polytechnique - En souvenir de la féministe inconnue mercredi 11 février 2009, Mélissa Blais admits that all men are not Marc Lepines: "Évidemment que les hommes ne sont pas tous des Marc Lépine", but she adds that in a patriarchal society men profit from women and learn to protect them. The good patriarch is the one who knows how to protect HIS wife and HIS daughters. What is she trying to say?

She says that "women and children first is wrong", that it is exploitation. She wants that the next time the Titanic sinks, men go to the lifeboats and let the women drown. We could oblige her of course, it suits most masculists perfectly these days to let feminists drown.

How come, she asks, that columnists and Newswriters have the unhealthy tendency now to separate good from bad feminists? Simply because there are bad feminists, I would guess. The bad ones being those who stir up the "Gender War", whereas the good ones are "les féministes du dialogue". She is offended that anyone could think that feminists have derailed the real meaning of the massacre, leading society astray for 20 years, that they still have to keep silent to respect the families of the victims.

She takes offense that anyone could ever think that feminists tried to exploit this tragedy. Saying that feminists have gone too far makes her real angry. She remembers Richard Martineau of Voir telling feminists to shut up to allow families to mourn in peace, and she holds a grudge against him since.

She can't stand the fact that many started to disapprove of radical feminism in Quebec in those years. "Et si le féminisme tuait ?", could anyone read front page in Le Devoir, of December 3, 1991. And also Audet remembers the pioneers Quebec antifeminists of those days, the Collectif anti-féministe du Québec (Montreal based) who succeeded in publishing front-page coast to coast in Canada on Monday March 4th, 1991 their 140 grievances against feminism. The Toronto Star, Journal de Montreal, La Presse, everyone printed it.

In July of the same year, La Presse titled "Les féministes accusées d’être responsables du drame de Poly et des assassinats d’ex-conjointes". The Collectif anti-féministe stroke again. But who were those guys who dared put in the mouth of every Newspaper in Quebec such words: "Marc Lépine et tous les autres hommes n’ont pas hésité à payer de leur vie leur engagement"? Those guys stopped to speak French altogether and became leaders in the Anglo-saxon world of antifeminism: Giskhan, Gisogod, Rochfort, Mark Rosenheim. These bad asses have kicked feminist butts since then.

Another one with a big title and a big ego from a little university: Micheline Dumont, historienne et professeure émérite, Université de Sherbrooke

Se souvenir du six décembre 1989 vendredi 6 février 2009

Dumont claims that many people in Québec accused feminists of having exploited this drama for personal gains and to further their agenda. In English Canada, on the contrary, these events have helped promoting awareness programs about violence against women. It helped the cause of English speaking feminists, while it produced a backlash in Québec. It was rather that men in Quebec finally started to fight back, with Roch Côté and his Manifeste d’un salaud in December 1990.

This selective assassination was really an iconic shooting on a world scale directed specifically agaist feminism, and making his perpetrator a legend. More than ever, Lepine could claim: "I am legend" much more than Will Smith. As journalist Francine Pelletier puts it: "the killer far from repeating mistakes of the past, stroke against what was really new in society: the rise of women". It is the reluctance of Quebec society to accept the political significance of the deed that worries feminists. But it never occured to them that no one is obligated to accept anything anymore.

Anyhow, this reluctance is shared by the authorities of l’École Polytechnique who still refuse to this day to admit that this killing was directed aggainst feminists specifically. Professor Daniel Leblanc wrote in 1990 that certain groups appropriated the killing to defend their claims. That they burdened the institution and the students with a cause too heavy to bear. From time to time, some lunatic loudly proclaims that he wants to "finish what Lepine started". The media gladly echo such words, but what is really starting to worry feminists in this country is when someone of stature dares say that feminism is obsolete and outdated. They begin to see red.

The rise of antifeminism worries them. The most profound change of the XXth century, that occured without spilling a single drop of blood, is now in danger because someone finally spilt some blood in 1989, and remembered us thereby that this political movement really started as a war of the sexes, and that this gender war is still aimed at men: directed and fought against them. The "résistance" however is gaining ground.

Mark SteynExcusing the men who ran away

The new film ‘Polytechnique’ sidesteps the old norm of ‘women and children first’, he begins to say. Does this guy ever heard of the official masculist position of what will happen the next time the Titanic sinks?He continues: "To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc Lépine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in all men, and which all must acknowledge." We can't blame him for thinking that. But when he contends that:

“The defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate—an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The ‘men’ stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and the killer walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.”

our dear Mark Steyn definitely crosses the line. What is this guy? A stirrer, a provocateur who takes cheap shots at Canadians? An idiot rather, who wants his 15 seconds of fame! Had he been there, Lepine could have obliged him with a bullet to the heart; or so could any of us striking his sternum with the flat of our hand, smashing his ribcage, impaling his heart and his lungs and letting him die of internal bleeding (no need of a gun for that). But experience shows us a better way, supreme with idiots like that: ignore them! (believe me, it works).

Barbara Kay from the National Post writes about how Marc Lepine's murder of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Canada is being used to promote feminist propaganda against men and especially against Canadian men. The title of her article is, “Lone gunman: The Ecole Polytechnique massacre was a freak tragedy. So why is every man made to feel guilty for it?”. Her article is right-on about the consequences of that long-running feminist propaganda effort, but it does not completely explains “why every man is being made to feel guilty for it,” although it makes clear that the goal of that propaganda effort is being met every year.

The evidence is clear: for days we watch news coverage of proceedings on Parliament Hill, we see the spectacle of grown, well-educated and well-informed politicians supporting the white ribbon campaign and advertising their atonement for the collective guilt of all Canadian men for the sins of one deranged gunman. But it is never a good thing to accept at face value anything feminists claim. They lie or accept as truth the lies of other feminists, and soon with the help of unsuspecting journalists, those feminist lies take on a life of their own.

Throughout history men did the dirty work for home and country. They died early deaths in horribly massive numbers on account of it, but although at times some were honoured for doing so, it is an accomplished fact that women were always treasured and even put on pedestals simply for being women. Men were the ones who were being subjugated, even before the Victorian Age. By the way, real men don’t wear white ribbons.

2 comments:

I am working on a feature-length documentary on the Montreal massacre. I am interested in exploring many of the issues you talk about in your blog: the war waged by different interest groups and, especially, the fact that Lépine really had feminism as a target, rather than the individual women we inevitably focus on.

Following this comment of Francine Pelletier, I agreed to meet her once and had an E-mail relationship with her for approximately two months. During these two months, I pomped ideas into this ''has been'' Journalist (now turned Documentarist) that seemed to have been deserted by inspiration for quite some time. I met het once at the Café Noir in Montréal on June 1st 2009 and was somewhat disappointed by this interview. Since then, I found out that she had stolen all my ideas and used them at an international convention of feminists that took place in Montreal from December 4 to 6, 2009 at the UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal).

Apart from stealing my ideas from me, she wanted to recruit me to help her, in some unspecified capacity with an upcoming documentary on Marc Lepine she was planning to produce somewhere in 2010 or 2011. Now the documentary was never produced, and I suspect that it was all a sham and that she had a hand in the conspiracy to put me and J.C.Rochefort in jail for ''guilt of opinion'' in the legal proceedings surrounding this blog in the Quebec criminal court in 2010.

I honestly believed that this good looking woman was less dangerous and not as bad as your average feminist, on which account I was obviously wrong. Francine Pelletier turned out to be just as treacherous and selfserving as the others.

For those interested, we have resumed operations at another blog, namely

THEY MAY DISAPPROVE OF THIS PAGE...

SPEAKING OF VIOLENCE...

WHICH ONE ARE YOU?

Yes, which one are you? For the most part, five groups of people are interested in the Marc Lepine phenomenon: feminists, real women, bleeding heart liberals, criminalists and masculists. All are welcome here to join and post. So which one do you belong to? Maybe the above does not describe you accurately though, and you would like perhaps to add a new category to the pool. Feel free to do so, even if you should be the only one in it. It says nowhere that one cannot be his/her own planet!